Friday, July 28, 2006

Following protests from some local residents about the content of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane, shooting of the film adaptation has been cancelled on the advice of police, reports BBC News.

Brick Lane Business Association chairman Mahmoud Roug told BBC News it was a "victory for the community".

Some members of the Bangladeshi community claim that the original novel, by Monica Ali, is "insulting".

The book is about a Bangladeshi woman sent to London for an arranged marriage.

Ruby Films is now seeking alternative locations for exterior scenes it had been due to film in the Brick Lane area this weekend.

In The Guardian last week Germaine Greer joined the debate. She's no fan of Ali, but says that all writers end up offending their subjects.

Writers are treacherous; they will sneak up on you and write about you in terms that you don't recognise. They will take your reality, pull strands from it and weave them with their own impressions into a tissue that is more real than your reality because it is text. Text is made of characters. A character is, as it were, graven in stone; when you are charactered you will last for ever, or pretty nearly, but what lasts will not be you. Every individual, every community ever to be written about suffers the same shock of non-recognition, and feels the same sense of invasion and betrayal.

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